He is sunrise, she is the world
by public static void
Summary: Tom was a lover of beauty, the kind of gentleman who prefers to visit museums and theatres over the trending nightclubs and jazz parties his friends liked to attend.


**For The Great 2016 Cotillion Challenge. Prompts: _Why do I love you, Ser?_ by Emily Dickinson, and 'appreciation'.**

* * *

Tom was a lover of beauty, the kind of gentleman who prefers to visit museums and theatres over the trending nightclubs and jazz parties his friends liked to attend. His way was more rural, as they put it, and the bright young things did not care for the old-fashioned and the traditions of a world before the War to end all wars. Tom couldn't see through the same rose-tinted glasses they had; the rebelliousness displayed by colleagues and their girlfriends did not fit with Tom's idea of a beautiful life.

He also didn't want what his parents had. Theirs had been a marriage of convenience that he considered a mistake in spite of giving him life. The idea of a woman being solely the housewife-shaped trophy he could display at home was not what Tom wanted. He wanted beauty, someone who could inspire in him unshaped emotions and take him to a new world without having to visit a secret party in a mansion bigger than a cathedral to do so. Tom longed for the woman who could bewitch his heart, his mind, and his eyes too. One of his friends often called him a bore, a man who wished for the moon in exchange of a few coppers, but Tom believed he would find the beauty-turned-woman he sought.

* * *

The Gaunt house would scare even the most reckless of his friends. In fact, as he rode past the house Tom could recall an occasion in which Cecil had refused a dare: when Evelyn challenged him to walk into the hut and steal anything from the house.

"The house itself would rob me of my happiness," Cecil joked and everyone laughed. His lips, though, were white with fear and Tom was not the only one who noticed.

In that moment, there was something else in his mind. The girl sitting by the window, with her dull hair covering half of her pale face. The eye he could see stared at him, piercing his soul with the intensity of its gaze. The passion hidden behind that grim face could not belong to the Gaunt girl; it would be more fitting in the body of a faerie or at least a changeling. Yet the impetuous emotion bled from her features, marred by illness and scarred by the will of the gods.

Tom could not look away from her; he took on everything she offered and saw only an aberration. Her eyes, when both were uncovered, looked in different directions; her lips were thin and overly large, and though her nose was not delicate and her ears were prominent, Tom found beauty in her face.

The same thin, large lips were also reddish. The contrast of the vivid hue against her ivory skin created a striking image. She looked like a half-finished opera magna in watercolour or a blurred photograph of the loveliest thing he could know.

Tom didn't know how much they stared at each other, the girl from the window and he from his horse. His companions had left him, the hooves of their mounts creating a sharp sound as they galloped away, competing in a senseless race. Time had stopped, but it kept its eternal flow in a strange manner; Tom stayed there, body frozen in place and mind running towards places never before known to man.

It was then that she closed the window, her thin arms looking like the fragile stem of a rose that bloomed and became the heaviest of the garden. It could be, Tom thought, because of the cloud looming over her and the house. The weight of being no one, the guilt of being related to two men imprisoned for curious yet worrying crimes, the shame of not being the picture of femininity she wanted to be.'

Tom let the unvoiced sentiment go with a sigh.

Then the girl came out from the house with a cup of water in her hands.

* * *

 _'Why do I love you, Sir, if you have never talked to me?', her thoughts scared her, because she knew such intensity of feelings were not normal. Her parents had never professed a love of this magnitude, and the only words her brother had for her were filled with hate and disgust._

 _Tom Riddle was a different kind of man. He, to Merope, was the sun about to peek from beneath the clouds on a stormy day, never knowing how the grass longed for its touch. Tom didn't care if he provoked in her the same feelings as the sun did to the grass, and perhaps that meant he wouldn't care if his seemingly_ momentaneous _appreciation of her were to be enhanced by a glass of water._

* * *

Tom found strange the smell from the girl, a mixture of expensive tobacco she couldn't pay in a lifetime, whisky and the sweet smell of the wooden violin his mother played. Maybe it had been a figment of his imagination, for as soon as he satiated his thirst with the water, the mixture was gone from the air as if it had never existed.

She was there, with features that could put a goddess to shame; Tom's blood ran through his body faster than ever, singing to the melodies created by the fleeting emotions running past his mind that he couldn't quite grasp. The tickling sensation on his throat might have been nerves, or the need to call out her unknown name. The burn on his eyes could be tiredness, or it could be the demand from his mind to keep exploring her flawless expression.

"I am Merope," she said.

Tom's ears rang with the sound. Angels could come and sing of sadness and tragedy, but he wouldn't hear because her voice was the pull he never knew had been tugging at him to join them. She, with three words, became his world.


End file.
